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Thursday, May 07, 2009

Video shows that Fong Lee DID not have a gun -- this young man was MURDERED by the Minneapolis Police Department, which even had the audacity to award a medal to officer Jason Anderson for this cold-blooded murder. The Minneapolis Police Department needs to be investigated and disbanded and put in receivership with federal controls. Murderers exist on both sides of the badge!

Parking/transportationShuttle buses will be available starting at 8:00 a.m. from Lao Family Community of Minnesota, 320 W University Ave, St. PaulOR meet at 8:00 a.m. at Joseph’s Grill, 140 Wabasha St S, St. Paul, and march with others across the Robert Street bridge to the Courthouse

On July 22, 2006, Fong Lee was riding his bike with friends when Minneapolis cop Jason Andersen and state trooper Craig Benz decided a little "aggressive policing" was in order. They rode their squad car up on the group of young men and, according to several witnesses, hit the rear tire of Fong's bike. Fong either fell or jumped off the bike as the officers ran out of their squad car. Andersen was pointing his gun as he chased Fong through a school playground. Andersen shot Fong 4 times in the back. As Fong lay dying, Andersen shot him 4 more times. 31 seconds after the start of the encounter, Fong Lee was dead. Throughout the entire ordeal, Benz never pulled his weapon.

MPD Lies and Corruption

After the killing, MPD claimed Fong had a gun. However, witnesses and evidence point strongly to a gun being planted on the scene by cops. The gun cops claim was recovered next to Fong's body was in their property room up to the time of the shooting and was likely brought on the scene by a sergeant. The gun had no fingerprints, DNA or blood on it. Further, Fong had a defensive wound in the palm of his dominant hand. The squad car video was rendered useless because it remained in the squad car to which Andersen had access for 10 days after the incident and has, according to experts, been partially erased. What the cops didn't count on is a video of the incident captured by a camera at the school. That video clearly shows that Fong never had a gun.

Case of Extreme Importance to Community

This case is emblematic of all that is wrong with the MPD and the judicial system that backs them up. Racial profiling, corruption, manipulation of evidence and outright lies are all part of this case. Immediately after the incident, cops went into spin mode to dirty up Fong Lee with lies that he was a gang member or criminal (he was neither). An internal non-investigation exonerated Andersen and a bogus grand jury process gave prosecutors political cover not to prosecute Andersen. The story about the gun has changed at least three times. Hennepin County if fighting tooth and nail to block release of the grand jury transcript even to the Lee family's lawyers. On top of everything else, the MPD spit in the face of the community by pinning a medal of "valor" on Andersen.

Lee Family Seeks Justice--Stand with Them!

The Lee family has always held that their son was murdered by Andersen based on race. They have bravely stood up to the lies and corruption of the MPD and continue to press forward, recognizing the importance this case has to the community. We must stand with this family as they try to bring at least some good out of Fong's death by forcing this system to be accountable and as they push for changes to prevent such tragedies in the future. This case goes to court on May 11 and there is a rally outside the courthouse. WE NEED YOU THERE to show the courts that the community supports the Lee family's demands for justice.

Rally sponsored by Coalition for Community Relations, Communities United Against Police Brutality, Lao Family Community of Minnesota, Inc., Minneapolis NAACP, Take Action Minnesota.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Mexico is in the midst of a hellish repeat of Asia's bird flu experience, though on a more deadly scale. Once again, the official response from public authorities has come too late and bungled in cover-ups. And once again, the global meat industry is at the centre of the story, ramping up denials as the weight of evidence about its role grows. Just five years after the start of the H5N1 bird flu crisis, and after as many years of a global strategy against influenza pandemics coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the world is now reeling from a swine flu disaster. The global strategy has failed and needs to be replaced with a public health system that the public can trust.

Read the full version at: http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=48

How “The NAFTA Flu” ExplodedSmithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu

By Al GiordanoSpecial to The Narco News Bulletin

April 29, 2009

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:

Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.

http://www.narconews.com/images/smithfldlogo.gif

The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.

By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”

La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.

It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the “Carroll Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”

Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)

Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

A pig farm in Mexico claimed to be the source of swine flu is host to a UN-registered CDM project.

The clean development mechanism (CDM) project, which has not gone into operation, was to be developed by UK-listed Ecosecurities at a pig farm near the town of La Perote in Veracruz state.

Media reports have cited the farm as a possible source of swine flu that threatens to become a global pandemic.

However the plant’s owners and the Mexican government said there is no evidence for these claims, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is carrying out an investigation at the site.

“Depending on the outcome of the investigation from the FAO, it is feasible that, if it had been implemented, the project would have helped by improving waste management on the site,” said Belinda Kinkead, head of implementation of Ecosecurities.

Little impact

Kinkead said swine flu was unlikely to have a major impact on supply of credits - unless the Mexican government was to order a mass cull of pigs in order to prevent the spread of disease.

But so far the government shows few signs of doing this until a firm link is established between porcine and human influenza.

According to design documents, projects that capture animal waste in Mexico could supply around 23 million carbon credits from the Kyoto protocol's CDM between now and the end of 2012.

But the percentage of credits generated by the sector is typically only a quarter of that promised.

Of the 89 projects in the sector registered by the UN, just 16 projects have been issued with credits.

Ecosecurities has plans to develop 28 CDM projects in Mexico that cut methane emissions from pig waste, but only 10 have gone into operation, as the number of credits yielded by such projects is now so small as to render many of them unfeasible, Kinkead said.

AWMS

Other investors in animal waste management systems (AWMS) include Agcert, a company that was formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange.

AES Agriverde, which now controls Agcert’s methane capture projects, said it couldn’t comment on the impact of swine flu on its Mexican operations because the company operates a media blackout in advance of declaring quarterly earnings.

Besides trying to sell CDM credits from projects developed by Agcert, the company aims to generate credits that could be sold in a future federal trading scheme in the US.

Only last week, before news of swine flu broke, a US developer Environmental Credit Corp said it would try and generate 200,000 CERs from methane capture projects in Mexico.

Cargill, a large US commodities trader, is also involved in methane capture CDM projects in Mexico, and is named as a participant in the La Perote project now being investigated by the FAO.

However, no one from the company was available to comment at press time.

Flies

Media outlets from across the world have reported claims by villagers close to the La Perote pig farm that flies feeding on animal waste at the facility had helped spread swine flu to the local human population.

The FAO has said so far there is no evidence that swine flu has spread directly from pigs to humans in this way.

At pig farms, companies such as Ecosecurities use technology known as an anaerobic digester to cover up lagoons of animal waste at pig farms and then generate electricity from the captured methane.

Evidence is emerging that traces swine flu to giant factory pig farmsthat are dirty, dangerous, and inhumane. Sign the petition to theWorld Health Organization to investigate and regulate these threats toour health:

No-one yet knows whether swine flu will become a global pandemic, butit is becoming clear where it came from – most likely a giant pigfactory farm run by an American multinational corporation in Veracruz,Mexico.(1)

These factory farms are disgusting and dangerous, and they're rapidlymultiplying. Thousands of pigs are brutally crammed into dirtywarehouses and sprayed with a cocktail of drugs -- posing a healthrisk to more than just our food -- they are the perfect conditions tobreed dangerous new viruses like swine flu. The World HealthOrganization (WHO) must investigate and develop regulations for thesefarms to protect global health.

Big agrobusiness will try to obstruct and scuttle any attempts atreform, so we need a massive outcry that health authorities can'tignore. Sign the petition below for investigation and regulation offactory farms and we will deliver it with a herd of cardboard pigs tothe WHO. For every 100 petition signatures we will add a pig to theherd, sign below and forward this email to friends and family:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/swine_flu

Last week the flu was all that we talked about -- Mexico has beennearly paralysed and across the world leaders halted air travel,banned pork imports and initiated drastic controls to mitigate thespreading virus. As the threat shows signs of subsiding the questionbecomes where it came from and how we stop another outbreak.

Smithfield Corporation, the largest pig producer in the world whosefarm is being fingered as the source of the H1N1 outbreak, denies anyconnection between their pigs and the flu and big agrobusinessworldwide pays huge sums of money for research to argue that biosafetyis ensured in industrial hog production. But the WHO has been sayingfor years that 'a new pandemic is inevitable'(2) and experts from theEuropean Commission and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation havewarned that the rapid move from small holdings to industrial pigproduction is in fact increasing the risk of development andtransmission of disease epidemics. (3)

Studies abound of the horrific conditions endured by pigs inconcentrated large-scale operations, and the devastating economicimpact on small farmer communities of bloated large-scaleoperations.(4) Smithfield itself has already been fined $12.6m and iscurrently under another federal investigation in the US for toxicenvironmental damage from pig excrement lakes.(5)

But even with all of this damaging evidence, a combination ofincreased global meat consumption and a powerful industry motivated byprofit at the cost of human health, means that instead of being shutdown - these sickening factory farm operations are propagating aroundthe world and we are subsidising them (6). In the wake of this swineflu threat, let's hold industrial pig producers to account. Sign thepetition for investigation and regulation:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/swine_flu

If we resolve this global health crisis boldly by reassessing our foodconsumption and production, and urgently calling for an inquiry intothe impact of factory farms on human health, we could put in placetough farm practice rules that will save the global population fromfuture animal borne lethal pandemics.

(1) Reports on the link between the Mexican factory farm and the flu:http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/for-la-gloria-the-stench-of-blame-is-from-pig-factories-1675809.htmlhttp://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-fg-mexico-flu28-2009apr28,0,1701782.storyhttp://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=can-swine-flu-be-blamed-on-industri-09-05-01

ABOUT AVAAZ Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit globalcampaigning organization that works to ensure that the views andvalues of the world's people inform global decision-making. (Avaazmeans "voice" in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money fromgovernments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based inOttawa, London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Buenos Aires, and Geneva.Call us at: +1 888 922 8229 or +55 21 2509 0368 Click here to learnmore about our largest campaigns. Don't forget to check out ourFacebook and Myspace and Bebo pages!

To contact Avaaz, please do not reply to this email. Instead, write toinfo@avaaz.org. You can also call us at +1-888-922-8229 (US) or +55 212509 0368 (Brazil) If you have technical problems, please go tohttp://www.avaaz.org

--Dorinda MorenoElders of 4 Colors 4 DirectionsHitec Aztec Collaborations/FM GlobalWe Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For!

“There is another way to live and think: it’s called agrarianism. It is not so much a philosophy as a practice, an attitude, a loyalty and a passion—all based in close connection with the land. It results in a sound local economy in which producers and consumers are neighbors and in which nature herself becomes the standard for work and production.” --Wendell Berry2 attachments — Download all attachments INFLUENZA MIEDO Y SEGURIDAD NACIONAL.pdf INFLUENZA MIEDO Y SEGURIDAD NACIONAL.pdf131K View Download message-footer.txt message-footer.txt1K Open as a Google document View Download

Methinks the intentional dumbing down began during the Reagan Years. How successful it has been. Have you noticed the decline the the quality of intellectual conversation around your favorite coffee shop(s)? RZ